Fathers Need To DEMAND Paternity Leave

One of the core issues I have with the traditional male gender role is the separation of men from their children in the initial stages of a child’s development. Adherence to this archaic definition of masculinity necessitates that at key stages in a child’s development, a father must be away, cooped up somewhere in some cubicle or whatever environment he works in, while his child’s brain is literally neurologically wiring itself and forming a conceptualization of the world for the first time in it’s life. What do you think a young boy who almost never sees his dad other than to watch him mosey on in, tired out of his mind from a daunting day at work builds as a conceptualization of his father?

He sees his nurturing mother, who feeds him, who gives him affection and caring, and then he comes, the father, the intruder. The boy is alienated from the start from his father, who provides him with the type of support that he is least likely to understand or be cognizant of, financial support. What does a boy know of the hard earned heat, food and electricity that his father supplies him with?

According to his perspective, these things are already provided, not by his father, but by the home he lives in. He knows not that the home has to be purchased and maintained by his fathers labor, he simply knows that when he flicks a light switch, the home illuminates his surroundings or that when he turns a faucet on, the home dispenses hot water. His fathers contributions are silent, and thus they are unappreciated.

His mother on the other hand dispenses her affection in a tangible, visceral way. She touches him, she kisses him, she puts his bandaid on when he scrapes his skin. She is maternal, caring, and to a young boy, likely ethereal. There is only one instance where the boy witnesses unpleasantness coming from his mother, and that is when they boy has misbehaved in a way that the mother needs extra help from the “intruder”, the father, to discipline him.

“Wait until your father gets home” She says threateningly.

These words alone are enough to strike fear and terror into the heart of a young boy, it is his first introduction to female proxy violence, his mother appealing to a man the boy cannot possibly challenge physically, his father. What lasting psychological implications do you think this has for young boys? To see his father rarely, while he is out securing resources the boy cant appreciate, and to see his mother use this tactic of proxy violence to terrorize him with the threat of his fathers angry presence? We often hear about parental alienation after divorce, but if you ask me the traditionalist provider gender role has nestled into it a default setting of parental alienation of fathers from their children. This has the added benefit of self perpetuating gynocetrism, in that at the point of divorce there has already been a precedent established that the children are more comfortable with the mother, and that to rescind them to the fathers custody would destabilize the children much more than to allow the children to stay with their mother.

It is with great interest then that I watch what seems to be more and more men agitating for more time with their children. Take the following article for example titled, Want more involved dads? Give them more time off early that details what happened when men in Iceland were given the same amount of parental leave as women:

Paid parental leave is a luxury in the United States. We’re one of three advanced and not-so-advanced countries in the world without it. Only 11 percent of all workers get it. And few of them are fathers. Dads, if they’re lucky, may get one day to a week, or two at most, one recent study found. That sets up the dynamic that Mom becomes the primary caregiver, not just at the start, but, like, forever. American moms, on average, do double the housework and child care of their spouses, even when they work full-time.

So what happens when you give dads more time? Take a look at what happened in Iceland.

In 2000, Iceland, pushed mainly by dads who wanted more time with their babies, sought to break the pattern that leads to traditional gender roles. Lawmakers changed their paid parental-leave policy and began requiring dads to take a portion, or the whole family would lose the time — a so-called “use it or lose it” policy that other Nordic countries had already adopted in the 1990s. Before that, families in Iceland were supposed to “share” a six-month paid leave. But most often, mothers took all of it. And, three years later, had most of the caregiving responsibilities.

The point of the change, according to the legislation, was “to ensure that children enjoy the care of both parents. The second aim of the law is to enable both women and men to coordinate family life and work outside the home.”

And that’s exactly what happened, according to a new study of more than 5,000 parents in Iceland.

Now, about 90 percent of all fathers in Iceland take paid parental leave, significantly more than before the “Daddy days” policy. Before the policy, about 34 percent of all parents shared care equally when their first born child turned 3. After the policy, nearly 60 percent did. The charts here show data on cohabiting parents only, and the percentage sharing care was even higher, at 70 percent.

So, essentially what this article is saying is that fathers will, if given the opportunity, take time off of work in order to take part in their children’s lives. What this says is that fathers do in fact value their time with their offspring and do not prefer to be out there working because the male gender role says so, they want to spend time with their children, they don’t because they are pressured into being the breadwinner. Another article titled Survey: Working dads want more family time gives the following statistics compiled by a survey by the job search engine careerbuilder.com it says:

According to a new CareerBuilder.com survey, 37 percent of working dads say they’d leave their jobs if their spouse or partner made enough money to support the family.

If given the choice, another 38 percent would take a pay cut to spend more time with their kids.

Nearly one in four (24 percent) working dads feel work is negatively impacting their relationship with their children. Forty-eight percent have missed a significant event in their child’s life due to work at least once in the last year and nearly one in five (18 percent) have missed four or more.

According to the survey, the time working dads spend on work far exceeds the time spent with their children.

More than one in four (27 percent) working dads say they spend more than 50 hours a week on work and nearly one in 10 (8 percent) spend more than 60 hours.

In terms of the time they spend with their children, one in four (25 percent) working dads spend less than one hour with their kids each day. Forty-two percent spend less than two hours each day.

Now then is it any wonder that women are awarded custody more than men? The problem is multifaceted here gentleman, I know that many of you want a neat easy answer, just “shrink the government” or what have you, but the problems we face are as much social problems as they are political, in fact, it is very likely that political change cannot proceed without social change first. If fathers want to stop getting screwed in the divorce courts, then they’d better start acting like they’re more than walking wallets to their children, they better stop embracing this traditionalist nonsense that says they have to be in the work place at the most formative period in their children’s lives.

Men have to be visibly seen saying that they reject this traditional provider role, and that they want to spend as much time as women do at home with the kids, or at least much more time than they currently are in comparison to women, and they have to appeal to social as well as governmental institutions to do that, because, guess what, if they don’t nobody will give a shit. Unless you air our grievances out there, nobody will give a shit if you suffer. It takes just one look at the current state of homelessness and the fact that most of these homeless have a penis, to show you that society will happily allow men to continue to function as ATM’s for women and their children.

They’ll let men starve on the streets, you think they wont let you work yourselves into self inflicted parental alienation? And yes men are starting out with a biological handicap, yes there’s an empathy gap nobody is denying this, but this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to focus on a certain issue that can benefit men, and slowly but surely change the social narrative on that issue. Look at gays for example, like all species we exist to reproduce, the chances that we’ve evolved some sort of innate compassion reflex towards homosexuals, who are statistically much less likely to reproduce is probably pretty low. It’s very possible that our species has a natural compassion gap for the issues that gay people face, and yet gay folks have been able to frame their issues in a way that has caused more and more people to accept their struggle as valid. When gay people are victimized, they rally together and make sure that people know they have been victimized and that there will be political and social consequences as a result of them being victimized. They practice Identity politics, yes I said identity politics. This is a dirty word, mainly because in the manosphere we’ve brainwashed ourselves to think that this is an evil thing, but I use the term identity politics simply to describe the following;

I am a man, thus I identify as a man, and I believe that men should act in the interests of men politically and socially speaking. Sometimes that means limiting government, which I’m all for when appropriate and if it’s in the interests of men. Sometimes it means demanding paternity leave when appropriate and if it’s in the interests of men and it definitely means also, attempting to compel the social institutions around us to empathize with us when we are genuinely victimized.

You see, it is a form of self censorship, when we refuse to acknowledge when we are genuinely victimized simply because social justice warriors feel victimized by everything that happens to them. Only a fool would not complain about his broken leg, because he’s surrounded by spoiled hipsters claiming to be victimized because their lattes weren’t right. The squeaky wheel gets the grease gentleman, if you allow the wheel bearing the most pressure on the pulley system to continue to go un-greased just because it doesn’t make any noise, it will eventually break. In a way this is our fault of course, because men think themselves too good or too masculine to claim they’re victims, y’know, thats pussy shit, thats commie shit, thats leftist shit…

If we ever figured out a way to bring the dead back to life, murdered men would rise up from the dead and refuse to admit they were victims of murder. Man woman myth, I’ll never forget it, once told me in a skype chat that if the penalty for men in divorce was having to be summarily decapitated, men would still get married. Heres another article I wanted to talk about titled How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters showing the lengths some men are willing to go to spend time with their children. It starts by saying:

Imagine an elite professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting, law, investment banking and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.

Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research,published in the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.

Ms. Reid interviewed more than 100 people in the American offices of a global consulting firm and had access to performance reviews and internal human resources documents. At the firm there was a strong culture around long hours and responding to clients promptly.

“When the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there,” said one of the consultants Ms. Reid interviewed. “And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.”

Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.

The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly asking for it.

They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.

A male junior manager described working to have repeat consulting engagements with a company near enough to his home that he could take care of it with day trips. “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said, adding that he generally kept weekend work down to two hours of catching up on email.

Despite the limited hours, he said: “I know what clients are expecting. So I deliver above that.” He received a high performance review and a promotion.

What is fascinating about the firm Ms. Reid studied is that these people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues. For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads.

So, I leave you with this. Men it seems DO like to spend time with their children, and are willing to lie to their bosses in order to do it, but can’t organize politically and socially to demand change? More on this later.

“…the traditionalist provider gender role has nestled into it a default setting of parental alienation of fathers from their children. This has the added benefit of self perpetuating gynocetrism…” – bar

True. As a Libertarian I will also concede that merely focusing on shrinking government won’t change this as it stems from both women’s demands upon men and what men willingly choose to accept in our relationships with women, in other words it’s cultural. I still think a shrinking government benefits all of us for many other reasons.

With the rise of the manosphere and MGTOW we’ve seen some few men stand up and demand more equality and respect but it seems to me this goes nowhere when women’s response is to simply shame us and continue their hunt for their workhorse/beta/chump.

I’m neutral on agitating on the political front. I won’t try to talk any guy out of it but I won’t engage in it myself. Women will always win that battle. I suspect if men are successful to any degree, women will just agitate further for even more gynocentric/misandric laws.

I can’t predict the future but the only thing I see as being capable of real change is MGTOW. If enough men simply opt out, women will go without families and long term partners or change their views of men (though I suspect they’ll never rise above the “blame men” routine). At that point, fair laws would seem to be a real possibility but that’s all speculation and may take generations.

Funny…the article says that dads in Iceland demanded more paternity leave and then got it…and here we have one great escapist theorizing about women loving men again if we just “shrink the state” whatever this nonsense means.

It is about the relation between men and their children and not about the relation between men and women. Women are adults and free and this is as libertarian as it gets. So let them stay free and see that we as men get our role as fathers for change, since the essence of gynocentrity is the sanctity of motherhood.

So the next time you want to shrink the state just look at male life expectancy in “small government countries” where men die between the age of 50 to 60.

Srsly…before your shrink the government you should grow your thinking. People are tired of this juvenile libtard bullcrap. If the state is the organ with which we can organize a meaningful paternity then so be it. There are several European countries that already have this policy in place and men now demand more and more freetime with their kids, thus breaking out of their gender roles, while you remain stuck, stifled and arrested in your pseudo-masculine “I-don’t-need-no-gubbamint” attitude, while women control your kids.

Maybe if your daddy would have had this opportunity you would have developed a higher logic, exceeding the childish thinking patterns of your homemaker mother.

Exactly! I am tired of these gynocentric right-wingers and their small government nonsense. They claim to have “swallowed the red pill.” However, at the same time, they fantasize how women will “love them” again in the hope that women will become dependent on them once more…just like the “good ol’ days.”

They don’t go their own way, but they just embark on a passive-aggressive reaction until mommy picks them up again.

While I do agree with you barbar, and i think this would be good for fathers, children, and even mothers for the long term, this will be an uphill battle. Politicals on both sides will fight this tooth and nail. The left is too busy pandering to women, the right will say ”how will we pay for this?”. Politicals on both sides are nothing but opportunistic dick suckers when its all said and done.

What’s VAWA? If a woman calls the cops and presents a bruise, the man goes to jail and his life is ruined. No presumption of innocence. No due process. Off to jail he goes and off his now deeply hated X wife goes with the local drug dealer and/or bartender. With who’s blessing? With the current, not quite yet divorced, sucker that married the manipulative witch. Who will back her up? The naive, butt kissing white knights (police and your best friends).

Ever hear the statement that “Men should never hit women.”? Ever hear the same with “Women should never hit men.”? Know who’ll die in his sleep reliving this debate over and over? Ray Rice. What’s my advice? You really, really don’t want to know.

Hundreds of millions of men’s lives have been destroyed by those that sell gynocracy, women’s liberation, family and feminism. Don’t get sucked into their rhetoric. Why? They’ll snap your neck and raid your bank account just as soon as they’d destroy the life of a sweet ducking.

Your life as a man has no importance to these folks. You’re a utility. Your own mother would sell you out if it meant a grand child of her own.

Bar Bar I am terribly sorry – this is the one and only time I will disagree with you vehemently especially reading the last provocative line of your post..I am not political at all, but are you suggesting that those of us MGTOW who were thoughtful enough to either get snipped or control our basal animal urges (practicing celibacy) by not impregnating a used up western slut now also have to subsidise impulsive men who didn’t use a condom correctly with more of our tax money shovelled down the rat-hole of the Gynocentric Borg institutions after we beg them “please pretty please atleast give us paternity rights’?? Does this mean MGTOW and mangina men with kids are more equal than childless MGTOW?

I am sorry, but you still haven’t shed your former Traditionalist MRA Ego’ – this was rightly called out in previous posts’ comments as being TradSoc MRA BS…if this is what even so called MGTOW have become then I have to double facepalm.

Reminds me of the “Can men be raped?” video link you shared 2 years ago using your Youtube account (The interview by the Canadian tradcon host who refused to accept men can be raped..your mentality is reminding me of him.) Atleast libertarian MGTOWs are consistently arguing from first principles instead of being opportunistic.

Anyway I guess us lesser untermenchen apolitical MGTOW will have to silently fuck off our own way to http://www.mgtowhq.com instead of calling BS on this idea and refusing to mooch for entitlements. Atleast the divorced folks on that site agree MGTOW is a simple idea, there is no need to overcomplicate it through misguided activism.

To borrow from South Park, I guess MRA penis sooo big MGTOW penis soooo small. We are so afraid to man up.

So men with kids are manginas? What is this crap if not straight out misandry? You think you are a better man because you do no have kids?

If I wanna read shit about bad and stupid fathers are then I can go to a radfem tumblr site as well. I do not need MGTOW for this.

It is a sad state of affairs if MGTOW is descending from understanding to a pit of despair that will just start to drive off those who seek the first over the latter. Maybe it is time to branch off and cut the frustrated lot lose.

Yes it is time to branch off and not co-opt MGTOW with MRA nonsense..if you wanna have a kid don’t expect single men to subsidise your lifestyle and vice versa..if unemployed single men expect welfare checks from MGTOW dads and MGTOWs who are single&employed.. then they are being just as unreasonable and I will defend your right from having your tax money taken for those bums.

It is barbar’s website so he can ban us who dissent (although he won’t) and also publish both MRA and MGTOW material (and call it a ‘MGTOW+’ blog).

Also, I meant MGTOW men with kids and non-MGTOW men with kids (manginas) – both of these categories being given preferential treatment over the celibate/snipped MGTOWs regarding paternity leave with the latter’s tax money.

Tradcons/Libertarians may argue that would be fathers won’t get hired due to this and feminists want men to suffer the same discrimination women face after returning to the work force post maternity leave…but I wanna steer clear from this sort of argument personally and not make the ceteris paribus fallacy..it is a non-linear complex system, so it is impossible to predict with current mathematical tools one way or the other who will benefit (despite it being a scientific certainty some men will benefit at the cost of others).